Rotherham child abuse scandal: a nation in disgrace

Rotherham: When the full extent of child abuse in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham was revealed this week, a sigh of recognition was quickly followed by a sharp gasp of horror.

There was an element of "not again", of yet another chapter of the United Kingdom's still-unfolding paedophile nightmare. But this was something else. It had sheer scale, scope, the length and breadth of the evil unfolded, the malice of the perpetrators and the close-eyed, back-turned, passive immorality of those who let it continue.

A nation is in disgrace. The UK has plunged into a debate over culture, race, immigration, political correctness, class, the politics of welfare, the north-south divide. Almost every fissure in British society seems to crack open at this point, from sheer weight of numbers.

One thousand, four hundred children, said the report by Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work in Scotland. That number, wrote Professor Jay, was "our conservative estimate" of the victim count in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013.

The report found 1400 children were abused in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013. Photo: Getty Images

She was close to tears at the press conference announcing her findings.

Her anger and shock were just as clear in the report: "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators."

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Even in 2014, young people told Professor Jay they were too ashamed or afraid to come forward for help.

Professor Alexis Jay was close to tears at the press conference announcing her findings. Photo: AP

For years those charged with protecting these children failed their task.

"The terms used by many people we spoke to about how those in authority dealt with [child sexual exploitation] were 'sweeping it under the carpet', 'turning a blind eye' and 'keeping a lid on it'. One person said of the past 'the people above just didn't want to know'."

Rotherham sits in England's industrial north, a borough of a quarter of a million in red-brown semi-detached rows, up and down hills amid fields, old quarries and post-coal industry.

This old Labour stronghold is bright with faces from across the old Empire. Mosques are dotted around the town centre, and food stores hawk Asian and English groceries, halal meat and poultry. A sign offers "social activities for Asian women" (in Britain, "Asian" usually means Indian or Pakistani heritage).

Tea and coffee are served from the 600-year-old parish church on the hill, and TV cameras stalk the bustling shopping malls, as if trying to X-ray through to the darkness underneath this sunny day.

But according to the report, the victims weren't usually to be found among the happy families of Rotherham.

They were the ones with troubled family backgrounds, with "a history of domestic violence, parental addiction, and in some cases serious mental health problems. A significant number of the victims had a history of child neglect and/or sexual abuse when they were younger. Some had a desperate need for attention and affection". A third were already known to social services because of child protection and child neglect, domestic violence and school truancy.

They were picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones, free alcohol and sometimes drugs. They were flattered and impressed. "I was driven around in fast cars," said one.

And then they were abused. And if they complained groups of perpetrators would sit outside their homes, smashing windows, making abusive and threatening phone calls. Sometimes the child victims would go back to the perpetrators believing this was the only way to keep their parents and siblings safe.

They were left damaged, suicidal, homeless, addicted and mentally ill.

One survivor, "Emma", told the BBC "[The abusers] used to threaten to rape my mum so, in my mind as a 13-year-old, it was 'well they gang-raped me so what stops them from doing that to my mum?'," she said. "They knew where she went shopping, what time she went shopping so they made it quite clear they would do it if that's what it took."

When she was 15 her parents moved her out of the country.

And there was little institutional will to save girls like Emma. The report found child victims of sexual abuse were not made a priority for children's social care, and police officers considered most of the young girls to be "undesirables" not worthy of police protection.

Three officially-commissioned reports alerting police and the council to an "established sexual exploitation scene" were ignored or disbelieved.

Partly, the report says, this reluctance to engage was due to the "issues of ethnicity".

In Rotherham, the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage. There was a widespread perception at the council and within police that the ethnic dimension was to be "downplayed".

One senior social worker was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children's social care said that when writing reports their managers told them to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Several councillors told Professor Jay they worried that opening up the ethnic issues would "give oxygen" to racism and attract extremist groups such as the English Defence League – which did indeed target the town.

Said the report: "Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'."

Even the journalist who first exposed the scandal avoided it at first. When The Times reporter Andrew Norfolk moved to Leeds in 2003, one of the first stories he covered involved young teenage girls targeted by "Asian men".

"I didn't want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable," he wrote this week.

However "I could not escape a nagging feeling that I hadn't done my job properly. I'd looked the other way rather than sought to establish the truth."

His conscience was regularly prodded by "strikingly similar" stories from towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands.

"It was always more than one man in the dock. And it was hard not to notice that … the convicted men in each case had something else in common. They invariably had Muslim names."

Norfolk gradually unpicked the scandal despite resistance from police, social services, the British government and even charities dedicated to supporting child abuse victims.

The tabloids had no hesitation in pointing the finger. This week the phrase "political correctness" got its biggest workout in years. Screamed The Sun: "Left's blind eye to child rapes"

"They knew about it for years. But the left-wing council let it go on because the rapists were Asian ... Think about that. They prioritised political correctness over the gang-rape of children."

Ed West, blogger at Britain's Spectator and a writer on immigration and the clash of cultures, wrote that " 'I didn't want to appear racist' is truly the 'I was only obeying orders' of our time".

"In Britain, there appears to have been a pattern of sexual abuse by second-generation Pakistani men," he wrote. "If the people charged with protecting vulnerable children notice this pattern then they should not only be free to look into it, but they should feel a duty to do so, and to raise the point in public."

West cites other recent cases in Oxford, Rochdale and Derby, where gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani-background men have been preying on girls in care.

"It's definitely something cultural and I don't think many people dispute that," he told Fairfax Media. "Most Pakistanis [in Britain] come from a particular part of Kashmir and most of them come from quite conservative rural communities. It's as far away from British attitudes to sex and individualism as you can get.

"There is certainly an attitude among some that women … are basically targets, they are not respected as people and they can basically be used.

"To ignore what is obviously a major pattern is contrary to trying to solve the crime."

Clearly in the long term, community cohesion has not been helped by trying to avoid mentioning race. Those opposed to mass immigration, such as the UKIP party, are going to make mileage out of Rotherham.

But this focus on race is not welcomed by all.

"The idea of a uniquely Asian crime threat is ill-founded, misleading and dangerous," Ella Cockbain, a research fellow at University College London's crime science department, wrote in 2013, after a similar but smaller scandal in Oxford.

It risked "fuelling racist rhetoric, distorting policy and practice and exacerbating community tensions".

In Britain the "Asian sex gang predator" has become a new "folk devil", Dr Cockbain said. But the single largest ethnic group among child sexual abuse suspects was white.

Dr Cockbain told Fairfax she was "not saying that social factors don't play a role in child sexual exploitation, just that it is important we don't reduce the issue down to one of race alone".

"I'm worried about this report. I think it will reignite this reduction of child sexual exploitation to just an issue of Pakistani-heritage men against white girls."

"It's completely inexcusable not to deal with a problem because it's politically sensitive, but I think it's a questionable assumption that just because someone is a certain race that means it's a racially motivated crime, which seems to be the conclusion a lot of people are jumping to.

"That becomes an immigration/xenophobia issue: 'this is a clash of cultures, this is because of arranged marriages'."

The perpetrators' occupation was "a lot more interesting" than race – "a lot of the offenders were working in jobs like taxi driving, fast food restaurants. The fact that they were Asian may be a lot less important than factors that [for example] gave them access to children late at night."

Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore says it's time to "join the dots to Savile and the other recent sex-abuse scandals".

"We have the police in on the case; we have institutions basically offering up the most vulnerable as victims; we have a protection racket centred around fame rather than ethnicity. At the top we have abusive men, at the bottom powerless young girls and boys. So the bigger picture is the systematic rape of poor children by men."

As for the wilful ignorance, Denis MacShane, a former Labour MP for Rotherham, says there was for a long time a culture in Britain of turning a blind eye to child abuse.

"Nobody pursued Jimmy Savile, nobody pursued Rolf Harris, nobody pursued [former MP] Cyril Smith. There is in our country just a dreadful culture and I wouldn't pick particularly on one ethnic community, but it is a real problem."

But Dr Cockbain warns against thinking this is a peculiarly British problem. She was at a conference last year with researchers in this field from around the world.

"Everyone was saying '[child sexual abuse] is a growing priority in our country'," she said. "It's just one of those issues where the more you look for it the more you find it."